You have studied innovation that is the result of mild deviance. How do you define these ‘workarounds’?
A workaround is a flexible and creative problem-solving approach that defies the conventions around how problems are traditionally solved — and by whom they are solved. One of the analogies I make is the notorious Trojan horse story from mythology, where the Greeks seized the city of Troy. It represents the idea that there are ways to accomplish things that have never been thought of before. In this case, the Greek soldiers didn’t have to scale the walls of Troy or break through its gates to seize the city. They came up with an ingenious idea: they built a giant wooden horse that was presented as a gift to the goddess Athena celebrating the Trojans’ victory over Greece. What they didn’t know was that there were 38 Greek soldiers hiding inside it. They were able to sneak out after dark and win the battle. That’s the very essence of a workaround.
ColaLife started to literally piggyback on Coca-Cola’s distribution chain.
One of your favourite examples of a workaround involves crates of
